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Datum - a piece of information.
Data - plural of datum.
We live in a world where instantaneous access to profound data is always at our fingertips. Data is so easily produced and accessed that we have a problem of finding quality data to consume. Data can be used to influence thoughts, actions, and decisions. These data can influence thoughts about things that fall into one of four categories. There are things that can be controlled by me (or oneself), and things that can not be controlled by me. There are things that affect me (or oneself), and there are things that don't affect me. Here is an example of some things and the categories they fit into.
Figure 1. Control And Effect
Now we can categorize everything that we can spend time thinking about into somewhere in these 4 categories. The things in the top left both influence my life and I have control over. I spend time thinking about these. Anything I can't control, there's not much use obsessing over. Anything that I control and doesn't affect me I should spend very minimal time thinking about.
The categories are not completely black and white. Some things can affect me more than other things, while some things I can control more than others. So the graph would look something more similar to this.
Figure 2. Control And Effect Euclidean View
Things that are closer to the top left, (my thoughts, my actions...) are the most important things to think about every day. Things that are in the bottom right are the least influential to me, so there's not much point in worrying over them.
From these 4 categories, there are 4 modes of thought that can be determined from these categories. From top-to-bottom, left-to-right, they are:
The Winning Mentality - The mentality of focusing on what can be controlled and what affects you allows you to focus your efforts on ways to improve yourself. You actively select for data that can blossom into meaningful improvements in whatever area of life you focus on.
The Losing Mentality - The mentality of focusing on things you have no control over weakens your fortitude and makes you a bystander to your own success. You could be focusing on something that you can't control which is beneficial for you (e.g. coming from a wealthy family, natural beauty), or that's detrimental for you (e.g. poor upbringing, health defect). These thoughts take the power out of your hands of your life and force you to live a life of circumstance.
OCD - Focusing on unimportant things you can control is a waste of time.
Philosophizing - Focusing on things that you can't control and don't affect you is interesting sometimes. Trying to understand how the universe was created is an extremely interesting question with probably a very interesting answer. If your goal is self-improvement, these things can be left for bar talk with friends rather than life pursuits, unless you're a modern day philosopher. A lot of people fall into the trap of worrying so much about modern day events or politics when in reality their life changes much less than it would seem it should after an "important" event.
So how does this affect how I should manage my data inputs? I believe we should have relentlessly high standards for the data that comes into our lives. Our ability to learn and make effecient decisions is no longer hamstringed by our access to data but rather drowned by the overabundance of bad or unimportant data.
Some beginning steps to do is to remove distractions from your life.
Figure 3. News Before uBlock
This is practically unreadable.
Figure 4. News After uBlock
Only (bad) data
After you've removed distractions, you can scrutinize your data sources. If I want to know the weather tomorrow, here is a good example of that:
Figure 5. Clean Data
-Straight, to the Point
-No fluff, no extras
-Only what you want and nothing more
-No call to action for the next thing
A bad example would be something like this:
Figure 6. Bad Data
-Shows very little useful info
-Lots of useless info
-Tries to bait me into consuming more bad data
-Plays on emotions (fear) with links
Filling the winning mentality with good data will make for a very productive and focused thought process. You can identify areas of improvement and find the good information needed to influence that improvement. Working in the wrong mindset will focus on the wrong types of data. Having a low bar for what you're willing to consume will waste time and not teach, or worse, teach incorrectly.